True Freedom Includes the Freedom to Say No (explicit language)

Tree of Finches makes some excellent rebuttals to common pro-porn pro-prostitution arguments about freedom, choice and empowerment. He also notes how liberals will gladly hammer a sneaker company over abusive practices but just can’t see it in the sex industry:

…I’ve been to strip clubs, and I fail to see how a woman can be empowered when she is crawling on her hands and knees with her butt in the air while dirty, ugly dudes stuff dollar bills between her breasts, or while pretending to be orgasmically excited by the act of grinding into the lap of some of the grodiest huggers in the world while they try to finger her without the bouncer noticing. That’s not exactly the kind of “empowerment” I want, and I’m pretty glad I don’t have it.

I’d also like to point out that even if a woman can feel empowered by such a profession, does it really make her more powerful? More well-respected?…

If so, I fail to see how; in fact, I live in a Navy barracks, I know exactly what men think of strippers, and the language is some of the crudest and most misogynist I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter, so respect is out the window…

True sexual liberation is the ability to say “no, I don’t want to have sex right now” and have it stick. The sex industry only gives women the ability to say “yes”. How is that liberating? How is that empowering?…

A woman who says “no, I will not be in a relationship with a man who uses porn or goes to strip clubs” is not seen as exercising her sexual liberation, she’s seen as a prude who apparently just needs a good fucking. Apparently “sexual freedom” only means the freedom to have wild, kinky sex, go to strip clubs, and watch porn, not the freedom to say “no, I won’t tolerate those abuses of my body and my sense of self-worth”.

And it’s THAT power which will really shake the world up in terms of equality. So of course, that’s the stuff that’s met the with most violent, nasty resistance.

…Are we talking about women who have the option between stripping, a scholarship to Harvard, and a fulfilling career in a skilled trade with no glass ceiling? Or are we talking about the option between watching your five year old starve on the street and taking off your clothes for men to gawk at you?…

Fight for women’s right to choose their path in life? Bloody hell, yes. What the sex-pos crowd misses is that part of that fight is enabling that choice to be an actual choice, instead of simply glamourizing their oppression and the performance of sexual acts and mimicry for men’s pleasure.

How many of the women in this thread would quit their jobs, or drop out
of their schooling, to become a prostitute? A stripper? A porn star?
It’s not a choice unless it can be freely chosen, and as the links I’ve
provided help to show, that fact is rarely in evidence…

…how bad did Nike have to treat its workers in China for liberals of the world to get up and boycott them? Not all those workers lived in such nasty conditions, though… but we didn’t focus on them. We focused on the suffering, we organized action, and we got results. When it comes to the sex industry, though, we see similarly deplorable treatment of workers, but we focus entirely on the ones who have it pretty decent and say things are pretty much fine as they are, no action necessary against the industry or even specific companies.

I see it as a pretty sad statement of the western world that we seem to be saying that we’re willing to tolerate more horror and abuse in producing our orgasm aids than we are in producing our shoes.

See also:

Escort Prostitution: A Response to Tom Vannah, Editor of the Valley AdvocateMr. Vannah concedes that “there is some percentage of people who are
not willing participants in the sex industry”, but believes that if the
Advocate refuses to accept Massage/Escort ads, this will unacceptably
crimp “artistic freedom”. He mentions Mapplethorpe pictures as an
example. How dropping ads for commercial sex enterprises will
compel the Advocate to turn away Mapplethorpe pictures is not clear to
us.

Now Showing at Amazing.net: The War on Privacy and Consent (explicit)Let’s grant, for the moment, that porn performers are indeed consenting
adults. We’ll set aside the evidence of abuse in their pasts, the abuse
on the set, the rampant addictions, the deception, the blackmail, and
the performers’ often urgent need for money and shelter–these are all
addressed in the articles below. Let’s look at the messages of the
films themselves, as sold today at Amazing.net/Goflix.com. Not only do
many of these films fail to foreground consent, they celebrate
invasions of privacy, violence, exploitation, aggression, coercion,
hatred, revenge and torture, selling them as sources of orgasmic
pleasure…

As we wrote last April, porn gets into dangerous territory when it makes the appearance of a lack of consent
out to be sexy. A common theme in porn is that many women will
initially resist many of the practices it promotes, but if you persist,
they will come to enjoy them. In other words, no means yes. This
attitude seeps into many viewers…

Testimony in Indianapolis: Porn Wants You to Believe Women Secretly Love Bondage and Torture, that “No” Means “Yes”The whole storyline indicates that she told him she was scared, and she
told him she didn’t want to do any of this, and she told him it hurt,
and she asked him and begged him to stop and yet, the storyline
indicates that secretly she loved it. Secretly, she was aroused and it
was the most wonderful experience of her life. This tends to be the
story that is retold and retold in this literature. And at the end of
the story, of course, she describes herself as the man’s willing slave.
All she wants is to do any humiliating tasks he assigns to her. She has
learned her lesson.

The Science Behind Pornography AddictionPermission-Giving
Beliefs are a set of beliefs that imply that my behavior is normal,
acceptable, common and/or doesn’t hurt anyone so I have permission to
continue to behave in the way that I am. In all types of violence and
addiction, Permission-Giving Beliefs are involved. Examples would
include “All men go to prostitutes”, “Women like sex mixed with
violence” and “Children enjoy sex with adults”. These particular
Permission-Giving Beliefs are also common in pornography…

Statement of Rev. Susan Wilhelm: “…the sex became especially abusive after he started using pornography” (explicit language)He
exposed me to the pornography, too. Once we saw an X-rated film that
showed anal intercourse. After that, he pressed me to try it. I agreed
to once, but found the experience very painful. He kept trying
periodically. He told me my vagina had become as sloppy as an old sow’s
and he could not get pleasure any other way. He also used to pinch and
bite me. When I said “it hurts,” he would say, “no, it doesn’t.” I
became numb. I lost track of my own feelings. One time, he said in
reference to himself sexually, “it’s supposed to hurt.”

Exposure to Pornography as a Cause of Child Sexual VictimizationThe
incest started at the age of eight. I did not understand any of it and
did not feel that it was right. My dad would try to convince me that it
was ok. He would find magazines, articles or pictures that would show
fathers and daughters or mothers, brothers and sisters having sexual
intercourse. (Mostly fathers and daughters.) He would say that if it
was published in magazines that it had to be all right because
magazines could not publish lies… He would say, “See it’s okay to do
because it’s published in magazines…”

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